Iāll fill out the google sheets later if thatās helpful (@anomalily, is it?), but a quick update on my testing of some various Mint replacements.
General info:
ā¢ Primary checking account: USBank
ā¢ Primary investment account: Fidelity, although I donāt use budgeting apps for investment advice so this is mostly important because itās also where I have my catch-all 2% card
ā¢ Local credit union for mortgage
ā¢ Credit cards from some of the major vendors (Chase, American Express, etc.) plus a couple smaller banks/credit unions for specific purposes
ā¢ Paypal account for charitable giving
I used Mint primarily for transaction tracking purposes since being able to see all of them at once is much easier than going through each statement individually, as well as for categorization with the totals per category getting moved to my own spreadsheet at he end of each month. Also really liked the ābillsā view where I could see all of the upcoming charges coming out of my checking account. I set up budgets but didnāt track them particularly stringently, and as noted previously didnāt have much use for the investment advice (or the net worth tracking since I do that elsewhere), but it was also there.
Personal Capital/Empower: Chickened out on reengaging with this oneā¦I initially tried both it and Mint at the same time and did not appreciate the repeated phone calls from them insisting that I needed to use their investment advisors/services, especially since they didnāt knock it off when I told them I wasnāt interested. A couple people at the other place have said that itās gotten better since it became Empower, but a couple still seem to be having the same issues, and Iām not up for dealing with that right now.
CreditKarma: Havenāt gotten the option to switch yet so not sure how this stacks up, but also not thrilled at what Iāve heard about CKās greater data harvesting (transaction info I donāt care about, especially since itās aggregated anyway, investment and banking info is a little more questionable).
Fidelity FullView: Free (at least with account) and the first thing I tried. Most everything syncād without problems with the exception of one of the smaller credit unions and Paypal, and since they didnāt have the ability to add transactions manually I wasnāt entirely thrilled. It seemed usable, though, especially since they did include things like being able to add your own categories for transactions and set up rules to organize them. They were also advertising a big update coming shortly when I started setting things up so I was hoping theyād fix the no-manual-transactions problem along with a few other oddities like defaulting to a rolling 30-day window rather than monthly tracking and not having anywhere that tracked recurring transactions. Unfortunately about the only thing their update did fix was the 30-day window thing, and on the downside it completely blew away the categories and rules Iād set up and did pretty bad things with transactions in general. They reverted very quickly with the note that they appreciated the feedback (I suspect they got a lot of WTF), but given that little mess Iād call this is a beta that Iāll probably keep an eye on but I donāt think theyāre there for what I need it for yet.
Monarch: 30 day free trial, otherwise $100/yr ($50 first year with MINT50 discount code). Got everything to sync without problems although I had to play around a little for both USBank and Fidelity which didnāt thrill me. My mortgage account also canāt seem to decide if it wants to stay connected, but I think that has to do with the authentication setup, and since itās obviously a known recurring transaction itās not a major issue. The categorization seems fairly good and it offers the options to set up rules as well, but the transaction layout is a little underwhelming since the basic view shows only merchant, classification, and $$, and Iād like to be able to see which account is involved without having to open the ādetailā view for each one. Thereās a Cash Flow tab that generates a monthly report that looks good for what I need, although with regards to bills I havenāt been able to get a lot out of the Recurring tab. That might just be because I havenāt been using it for a full month, though, so it hasnāt gotten a lot of input to determine what is/is not recurring (I did try importing from Mint, but especially with custom categories a lot of stuff didnāt come through very cleanly). Best assessment thus far is that this would probably do what I want, but with only a 30 day free trial to figure everything out Iām still kind of mehā¦I could do another couple months at the month-to-month price to see if it really does what I want prior to locking in for a year, but I like the next option better.
Simplifi: 90 day free trial, $48/yr ($0 first year if importing data from Mint, and I can say I tried this with one set of transactions from a little-used card and it immediately updated my renewal date). This one didnāt sync with one of my smaller credit union cards (PenFed) but I was able to pull in everything else, and customer support actually responded when I asked about known issues and told me how to escalate which I appreciate. Similar to Monarch with regards to ability to create and organize categories and set up rules for transactionsā¦the gui view is quite a bit busier, but Iām on a computer screen which makes that not a big deal, and the Transactions tab does include account information along with the other details which I find helpful. Also the Reports tab summarizes nicely by month. It has a Bills tab as well, but like Monarchās Recurring tab I havenāt been able to get much use out of it yetā¦for example it seems to classify more than two purchases from the same merchant as a recurring bill which is mostly not how I consider groceries to work. Again hoping this is a training/dataset issue (to import from Mint here you have to go account-by-account and I probably wonāt bother with most of them). This is probably the app Iām going to go with since at first glance it seems to meet all of my basic requirements and thereās a much longer trial period to find any showstoppersā¦even 90 days is much better than the single month since it gives me a bigger dataset transaction-wise and more time to play around with what it can really do month-over-month.
